GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890 Round-Up

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Crysis v1.21

Crysis v1.21

DirectX 10 Gaming Performance

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine produces some stunning visuals that are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the PC to date. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet. In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is a beast of a game. We ran the full game patched to v1.21 with all of its visual options set to 'Very High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested A custom demo recorded on the Ice level was used throughout testing.

While 3DMark Vantage gave the ATI fanbase a reason to pause, Crysis, typically considered one of the hardest benchmarks on GPUs, portrays the HD 4890 in a different light. It's not exactly a runaway, but the Diamond and HIS HD 4890's ran the highest frame rates at 1280x960, with the XFX model finishing just behind the only overclocked GTX 275 of the bunch. That advantage seems to slip, however, as we raise the resolution settings. At 1920x1080, the MSI and Gigabyte cards begin to make up a little ground, although all told the vast majority of both GTX 275s and HD 4890s are running within a half of a frame per second of each other.